US & World

Stop me before I Facebook again

Media research firm Nielsen calculates that one in every four and a half minutes online is spent on blogs and social networking sites.
Illustration by escapedtowisconsin/Flickr Creative Commons License

Vanessa Romo | NPR|December 13, 2010

Being surrounded by a nonstop stream of information hasn't exactly helped us focus or concentrate on our work. But a software developer has come up with a barrier to help social media addicts kick the habit. The application is aptly called Anti-Social.

"We get a serotonin hit from this," says Kathy Gills, who teaches about the intersection of digital media technologies and social institutions at the University of Washington. "So those of us who are susceptible to that high keep getting these little Pavlovian dog responses. It's new, it's shiny...wheee! So, if that's part of your personality or genetic makeup, then these technologies can be something that you need to consciously think about managing."

Nielsen, the media research firm, calculated that one in every 4 1/2 minutes online is spent on blogs and social networking sites.

So, Fred Stutzman, a software developer, created an application to combat all of this time wasting. It's called Anti-Social.

The idea came to him after he fell into the Wikipedia trap: "You're doing some writing, you're doing some research, and you want to look something up and you find yourself at Wikipedia," Stutzman says. "And, as it always happens, one page on Wikipedia turns into to two to five to 10, and then you spend an hour learning about things but not necessarily getting work done. So by having a simple barrier to keeping yourself offline, it's very effective in terms of productivity."

Enable Anti-Social and it's impossible to access Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and any other site you specify -- without rebooting your computer.

Pankaj Prasad, a business developer in San Francisco, found the program a useful tool.

"I believe I saw a tweet on it, which is kind of ironic because I was wasting time when I came across it," he says.

Prasad installed Anti-Social on his work computer recently. Before installing it, he says, he would take "like maybe 10-minute breaks every 20 to 30 minutes."

That means Prasad spent an average of 2 1/2 hours a day doing anything but work before he began using the program.

But Anti-Social hasn't kept him completely productive.

He says on a scale of 1 to 10, "I would probably give it a six because when I'm in front of my computer I won't [check] Facebook or Twitter. But I will give myself an F because I still lean back and check it on my phone."